Widespread Firefox issues

Keith Medcalf kmedcalf at dessus.com
Sat May 4 22:10:18 UTC 2019


Aha!  Did the same and it worked.  I had disabled Normandy probably immediately when it was introduced.  I guess if you have it disabled then studies (even if enabled) are disabled as well.

After getting the studies I disabled studies again (since I don't want them) and disabled normandy (since I do not want external third parties frikking about with my settings just cuz they feel like it) -- if you want to fiddle with the settings on my equipment you have to physically be within the blast radius of the device you are fiddling with (or the automated Nitrogen oxygen purge system).

We will see what happens mid-afternoon tomorrow when Firefox tries to run a signature check again (since the original problem report was in error -- the check is only run once every 86400 seconds, so at the next check after the intermediate certificate expires the add-ons will be disabled).

---
The fact that there's a Highway to Hell but only a Stairway to Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic volume.


>-----Original Message-----
>From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Royce
>Williams
>Sent: Saturday, 4 May, 2019 15:44
>To: nanog at nanog.org
>Subject: Re: Widespread Firefox issues
>
>
>On Sat, May 4, 2019 at 8:02 AM Royce Williams
><royce at techsolvency.com> wrote:
>
>
>	On Sat, May 4, 2019 at 7:40 AM Royce Williams
><royce at techsolvency.com> wrote:
>
>
>		On Sat, May 4, 2019 at 7:32 AM Keith Medcalf
><kmedcalf at dessus.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>			I will stick to the "clearly false" since it is now
>well to the point where we are in 2019-05-04 (even in local UT1, let
>alone UTC), studies are disabled (and have been since forever), no
>studies have been loaded, and my extensions still work quite fine,
>thank-you.  Attempting to install a "new" extension fails with a "bad
>signature" error.
>
>
>
>		Here's something interesting - a few times now, I've told
>Firefox to enable Studies and then restarted ... but the Studies
>setting reverted to being unchecked.
>
>		Maybe one of my other paranoia-enabling extensions is
>toggling it off ... but if so, I haven't found it yet. Still
>investigating.
>
>
>	Even stranger, I can manually toggle
>'app.shield.optoutstudies.enabled' in about:config ... and *that*
>persists across reboots ... but Studies *still* aren't enabled (the
>about:preferences item is still unchecked, and the "about:studies"
>area still indicates that they're disabled).
>
>	There's definitely something weird about enabling/disabling
>studies.
>
>	FWIW, this is 64-bit 66.0.3 on Ubuntu, and it's an instance of
>Firefox that had studies disabled before this issue emerged. On a
>very similar setup, but one with a vanilla Firefox install that
>already had Studies enabled, I can't recreate this symptom - even if
>I turn Studies off (either using the GUI or with the about:config
>item).
>
>
>Multiple people have replied offthread that they have the same
>symptom.
>
>This workaround worked for me:
>
>https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bkk5ss/if_you_dont_want_to_
>wait_do_this/
>
>
>Royce






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